Watching my tenth graders take the PSAT, I’m remembering the last standardized test I took — the English Praxis exam to earn a secondary English cert. I was prepared by disposition and academic training to blow the doors off that test.

I was pudding afterwards.

How do kids feel when they’re not prepared for tests and have the gaps in their own education so brutally thrust in their face?

Started Dave Eggers’s new book last night on a soccer sideline. One of the characters begins the book with a new career at Google The Circle.

Book may turn out alright, may not. But it got me thinking of how rare it is to begin a job so happy and with all the tools you need to do it; how rare it is to have a job where your “boss” talks about the importance of humanity; how rare to have any kind of moral clarity that isn’t immediately and obviously compromised by the working conditions.

1. Dave Eggers, The Circle,(New York: Knopf, 2013).